As I writer, I think I can imagine what it would be like to try to write a joke book consisting of “more than 600 funnies” exclusively about superheroes. It’s the type of assignment that would probably result in many hours spent staring out the window, huffing down lattes and questioning my life choices.

So I must give credit to “The Official DC Super Hero Joke Book” author Noah Smith, who with collaborators Sarah Parvis and Michael Robin has managed to create pretty much the most you could hope from such a project -- a book that’s sure to delight young superhero fans while at the same time eliciting possibly vision-threatening eye rolling from parents whose tolerance for bad puns has waned with age. (Example: “What do you call Superman’s city after a rainstorm? Wetropolis!” Etc.)

Smith, a playwright who has written material for “Saturday Night Live” (!), really had his work cut out for him. Not only could the jokes only be about superheroes, they had to be about DC superheroes, notoriously the least-humorous superheroes there are. I don’t care how cheery they look yukking it up on the cover -- you know that as soon as the laughter stops Batman will go back to brooding about his dead parents, and Green Lantern will be beating himself up over that time he found his girlfriend stuffed in a refrigerator. (In Green Lantern No. 54, look it up.)

The authors keep the jokes flowing by sticking to a few tried-and-true formulas: the aforementioned plays on words (personal favorite: “What do you call Batman when he eats at a French restaurant? The Creped Crusader!”), variations on old jokes with superheroes shoehorned into them (“What do you call Black Canary when she’s wearing earplugs? Anything you want, she can’t hear you!") and jokes that hinge on what the individual heroes’ powers are (“How fast is The Flash? Even when he’s asleep, he’s fast asleep!” You know, because he’s so fast).

Those more than do the trick when it comes to mining the potential for kiddie superhero humor, but amazingly, there’s one real, authentic comedy routine stuck right in the middle of all that punning and mugging, which I’ll recreate for you here:

Green Lantern: “My power ring won’t work on anything yellow.”

Golden Age Green Lantern: “My power ring won’t work on anything made of wood.”

Guardian of the Universe: “Wow! Two superheroes who could be defeated by a No. 2 pencil.”

Compared to the rest of the book, this is Seinfeld-worthy observational humor! What is the deal with those power rings? All I know is, when I came upon this humor gold it was completely unexpected -- I felt like Elaine when she was visiting the old lady with the goiter and found out she’d had an affair with Gandhi. (“The Mahatma??”)

We can only hope that Smith & Co. follow this up with a joke book aimed at a slightly more sophisticated audience that has more material like that -- “So what’s up with Streaky the Super Cat? Is he more indifferent than a locomotive?” Hmm, this is harder than it sounds.

In the meantime, the kiddies are bound to enjoy the goofy superhero jokes in “The Official DC Super Hero Joke Book,” and parents will at least appreciate all the cool art drawn from what looks like about 75 years worth of DC comic books. And no matter how cheesy, it’s impossible to be too down on any book that poses the eternal question, “What does Wonder Woman wear when it gets cold?”